LAND AND LIBERTY IN MEXICO

~~~~~~~~~~

The uprising in Chiapas which began on January 1st 1994 - coinciding with
the signing of the NAFTA agreement - immediately confirmed two open secrets.
The one was that the Mexican economy was in a mess. Despite the efforts to
achieve equal status with the rich nations this top-of-the-form pupil of IMF
and World Bank policies suffers from such serious internal divisions that it
just doesn't make the grade. The second was the knowledge that an uprising
would occur for the actions of the Zapatistas had been long in the coming.

This could in some ways be traced back to the eve of the Olympic Games
which were held in Mexico City in 1968. A student demonstration at the time
was brutally put down by the military/police killing some 200 demonstrators
in the process. Hundred more were imprisoned - in many cases held for up to
three years without trial. This was one of the key factors giving birth to
the Generacion de 68. Many of those imprisoned were intellectuals coming
from a variety of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist and anarchist persuasions. It is
in many ways these same people who were the key figures in preparing and
executing the Chiapas rebellion.

But in another sense the rising had a much longer gestation period and is
firmly rooted in the indigenous peoples sense of injustice and their
awareness of a cultural identity which has more in common with anarchism
than the neo-liberalism of the current regime.

I wish to show in this essay that the culture of the indigenous people of
Mexico historically displays many of the traits that would be necessary to
any definition of anarchism; that capitalism was an unnatural system forced
upon them by a process of colonialisation carried out by European statists;
that this perversion has, down the years but with particular reference to
the immediate past, brought into being a crippled development and that the
state, being instrumental in this process, has been unable to solve the
inherent social problems of the people of Mexico even when occasionally its
intentions were benign. I will argue that the root of this continuing
problem is traceable to the continuing crisis in Mexican agriculture -
exacerbated today by the forces of global integrationalism - which can only
be solved by the people organising themselves into social organisations
capable of solving the land problem that the political parties have proved
themselves unable or unwilling to deal with effectively.

THE HISTORIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PEOPLE AND THE LAND

Peter Newell in his book Zapata of Mexico includes an interesting
appendix where he considers amongst other questions the close relationship
between the people and the land in this area of the world. The first
settlers in the central area around what is now known as Morelos held their
fields in common, were largely self-sufficient - an important factor for
anarchists I believe - and advanced in their agricultural techniques being
extremely productive and producing crops several times per year. It was
about 500 years later that the Toltecs - one of the main groups in Chiapas -
arrived. Likewise they were skilled farmers cultivating a wide variety of
domesticated plants.

These early societies had little concept of landed property. Even when
the groups became sedentary the concept of individually or even family owned
property was long in the forming. Indeed even as late as the 15th century
Newell quotes Parkes as saying:

The mass of the people cultivated the land. Land was not held as private
property. Ownership belonged to the tribe or to some smaller unit within it.
Each family, however, was allotted a piece of land which it cultivated
independently. Certain lands were reserved for the expenses of the
government and the support of the priests, these lands being cultivated by
the common people.

Clearly government in some rudimentary form had already appeared. Indeed
it was firmly established in those areas where the Aztecs held sway where
also - as might be expected - the notion of slavery had already made an
appearance. Yet even here Newell quotes Lewis Morgan Henry saying that, 'The
Aztecs and their Confederate tribes still held their lands in common... land
belonged to the tribe, and only its produce to the individual". Thus the
land was, throughout the region, owned in a communistic fashion. This was
seemingly so natural that - despite the intervening colonial period -
Ricardo Flores Magon was able to write in 1906 that:

...in Mexico there are some four million Indians who lived, until
twenty or twenty-five years ago, in communities that held land, water and
woods in common. Mutual aid was the rule in these communities and authority
made itself felt only when the rent collector made his periodic
appearance... Each family cultivated its special strip of land, which was
calculated as being sufficient to produce what the family required; and the
work of weeding and harvesting the crop was done in common, the entire
community uniting to get in Pedro's crop today, Juan's tomorrow and so on.'

Clearly the notion of government and authority was not absent from all of
this. Mayan civilisation as well as Aztec was highly theocratic with a
priestly caste which along with any warrior class helped establish in time
honoured fashion the trappings of government. However, amongst the Mayans,
power was highly decentralised which proved one of the main problems for the
conquering Spaniards when they arrived meaning that they had many centres of
power to conquer rather than just one head to cut off.

I do not wish to devote much space to considering the role of the Spanish
- the story is well known. Briefly the Spanish sought to dismantle the
natural social forms they found by stealing land from the Amerindians and
giving it out to settlers who, supported by the Church, were charged with
socialising the locals with religious propaganda and its attendant values
systems. Of more significance, however, was the new attitude to land which
was foistered onto the area and which sowed the seeds of the current crisis.
Indeed what the World Bank has called the 'best example of a bi-modal
system' was brought into being by the Spaniards. They introduced two forms
of land ownership which I must now introduce and which will be important for
the rest of this essay.

The local people were given a degree of independence by being granted
tracts of common land called ejidos which allowed for subsistence farming.
This was no charitable project. Indeed given the continuing class
stratification taking place at the time this was of use to the emerging
landowners who could make the Indians work on their own land (they owned the
Indians along with the land - the system introduced by the Spanish was
essentially feudal) but could do so without remunerating them given that the
ejidos presumably gave them what they needed for basic survival. Still the
owners of society were not satisfied. They continued encroaching onto the
ejidos until they had succeeded in creating the enormous haciendas: the
other side of the equation that has blighted Latin American agriculture for
so long.

Whilst the ejidos could still be seen as part of an economic system
geared to use-value the haciendas were geared solely to the capitalist
notion of exchange-value. European 'civilisation' had successfully been
imposed on the naturally anarchic domestic culture.

THE ROLE OF THE STATE

Although the conquistadors were little more than pirates it is vital to
realise that the conquest was achieved not simply by a bunch of bloodthirsty
sadists. It is well known that infections such as influenza and smallpox
were the two major generals in the imperial army and indeed it is arguable
that the Americas might never have been conquered without them. In North
America smallpox was deliberately introduced in an act of genocide which
perhaps has few historical parallels. More importantly it must be emphasised
that New Spain was simply an outpost of the Iberian peninsular and subject
to direct Spanish rule. As always, therefore, the new social stratifications
were introduced by means of state power. The conquistadors were controlled
by agents of the Spanish crown known as gachupines and the Viceroy's rule
over the whole show was indeed despotic. Property laws - a new phenomenon
even in Europe - were the means by which the haciendas came into being. All
land belonged to the Spanish crown thus dispossessing the Indian villages.
These lands were slowly and progressively seized and after an elapse of time
the situation was regularised by the legal system. Thus, over a period of
time, the lands which the conquistadors originally owned became the new
haciendas covering most of the fertile lands of central Mexico.

Independence in 1821 did little to improve the situation. Legislation
like the Ley Lerdo (1856), despite the hopes of some of its supporters,
failed to improve the lot of the underclasses. Its practical effects were to
allow those with wealth to increase their control of land at the expense of
the many. It was this situation which sparked of the Mexican revolution.

In the long term this also did little to help the people who gave their
lives for it. But it did usher in the new era. One in which at various
stages attempts at land reform were made (more than can be said of other
countries in the region) but which all ultimately failed to one degree or
another essentially because of the involvement of the state in the process
which had of course caused the situation in the first place.

The state almost by definition is a conservative force. It presides over
a social set-up which has willingly or otherwise allowed it to achieve and
keep power. Any tinkering with the basic social infrastructure is not in the
interest of any state given the possibility of apple carts being upset. Thus
in the early days when presidents like Obregon and Calles made some moves to
redistribute land to the ejidos the larger landowners were handsomely
compensated and the peasants were subsumed into the clientelistic political
apparatus. Instead of land and liberty at best the people got land and the
state.

In the thirties Cardenas succeeded somewhat in breaking up the feudal
system allowing for Mexico to develop industrially. However the reforms
introduced during this period simply organised co-operative farms dependant
on the government for finance. The government also successfully controlled
the campesinos not only in this economic way but also politically by
channelling demands for land and services through organisations under its
control by incorporating the ejido's comisariados into the structures of
clientelism and political patronage. This corporatist approach had the long
term effect of creating a dependant, passive agrarian sector - again
indicative of the conservatism of the state.

COMING UP TO DATE

The land crisis at the heart of the Mexican problem has not been solved
although certainly political lessons seem to have been learnt from the past.
The EZLN has stated repeatedly since the uprising began that land reform is
crucial to their programme. For example on March 1st 1994 they stated that,
'we want the great extensions of land which are in the hands of ranchers and
national and foreign landlords and others who occupy large plots... to pass
into the hands of our people'.

The crisis in Chiapas is not a local one and it affects the whole of
Mexico. This agricultural system that I have traced back to the time of the
conquistadors is in the words of the world bank, "probably the best
representation of a bimodal agricultural system". That is to say that there
is a small number of enterprises which are well capitalised and tied to the
governing elite who have over the years dedicated to them state financial
and technical resources. On the other hand there are the impoverished many -
about 7,000,000 (some 10% of the national and 40% of the rural population of
the country) live in conditions of desperate poverty. Chiapas offers us a
microcosm of a far larger picture.

In Chiapas the bulk of the population is dependant on agriculture. Over
half the population earn less than US$3 per day. This however, contrasts
with the overall agricultural wealth of the state being in the top three for
prouction of coffee, maize, bananas, tobacco and cacao.

However this is not because the land is mainly owned by the commercial
landowners. Indeed it isn't - over 50% of the land is owned by the ejidos.
We need to look beyond this simple explanation. A study by ECLAC helps.

11% of agricultural producers in the ejido sector are commercially
viable - marketing about 90% of their produce. At the other end is a further
31% who, marketing one third or less of their produce cannot obtain the
basic necessities of life. The remaining 58% whilst marketing a significant
proportion of their produce can still barely eke out an existence on their
land. Thus about 90% of the ejido farmers are not economically viable.

The neo-liberal solution to all this is well known - those who fail must
go to the wall. This reason is tragically flawed for at least two reasons.
Firstly, as the process of integration continues (the NAFTA being one
milestone along the track) the competitive arena will progressively be that
of the global market. Given Mexico's inability to compete here the already
small number of 'successful' ejidos will fail as will those more privileged
landowners, outside the ejido section, who traditionally enjoyed state
protection but who will, as the natural shelter of the nation-state is taken
away from them due to the development of trading blocks, also fall into the
arms of bankruptcy. The idea that Mexico can compete with it's Northern
neighbours due to the cheapness of its labour fails to take into account the
capital based nature of the northern agricultural systems. But secondly,
once again the above statistics don't paint the full picture and indeed to
the extent that they suggest that the ejido sector is unproductive they
falsify the truth.

The top 11% of the ejido do not owe their success to control of large
tracts of land. The ECLAC study puts their success down to easy access to
bank loans which has allowed them to capitalise the agricultural process.
But does this mean that capital intensive farming is naturally superior to
labour-intensive farming? The answer is far from clear. According to Barkin
the land reforms introduced by Cardenas, insufficient as they were,
encouraged most farmers to dramatically improve their production:

Contrary to what many experts predicted, these poor, unschooled peasants
were able to increase the productivity of their lands at an average annual
rate of more than 3% following the redistribution of the 1930s, doubling
their meager yields to more than 1.2 tons per hectare by 1960. The system
put in place by Cardenismo encouraged the peasants to achieve substantial
improvements in productivity by the back-breaking application of inherited
cultivation practices, together with the fruits of local experimentation
with seeds, fertilizers, and soil and water conservation techniques. Despite
this encouragement, however, the peasants were condemned to poverty by a
rigid system of state control of credit and the prices of agricultural
inputs and products.

Given the right conditions it can easily be argued that traditional
farming techniques are equal to if not superior to those which are
encouraged by the neo-liberal policies. To this equation we must of course
also add the important factor of the quality of the land and the irrigation
infrastructure that attends certain areas.

Here we turn away from the ejido sector - even that 'successful' part of
it - to look at the private sector located in the more favourable parts of
the state. Soconusco, the region of the state with the most developped
commercial sector is a case in point. Here 18% of the population lives on 7%
of the best land. The plantations are exchange-value based - that is
essentially geared to the international economy rather than satisfying local
need. Beef cattle raised for the international market is one of the products
raised on the plantations where the average private landholding is about 8
times that of the average ejido holding. At the top of the pyramid are some
150 holdings (with all the built in privileges I have described) which are
between 50 and 100 times the size of the ejido sector and a further 100
which are more than 100 times the size of the ejido sector.

The overall picture therefore is one of where the private sector reap the
benefits of an unfair share of the best lands in the state. Such an unlevel
playing field cannot be studied with a view to drawing conclusions about the
relative merits of two different approaches to the land question that is on
the one hand a neo-liberal system geared to an international economy and
motivated by profit and on the other hand a labour-intensive system based on
popular control and geared towards serving the needs of the people. Clearly
the regime as one might expect stands for the former and the uprising seeks
to advance the possibilities of the latter winning through. What are the
chances of success for each approach?

THE MEXICAN CRISIS AND THE NAFTA

The Mexican economic 'miracle' is in large part dependant for its
analysis on those parts of the economy which are geared towards the
international economy. In considering the issues involved here I wish to
braket certain questions from the outset. Firstly, the argument as to the
nature of change in the global infrastructure and indeed whether change
is/has occured/occuring. This is important but I feel the realities of the
situation can be discussed without direct reference to the nature of the
changes that are taking place. Secondly, we need to confine ourselves to the
land question. The arguments we are putting forward therefore may take on at
the very least a different hue when applied to other parts of the economy.
So having entered these caveats what are the prospects for the two
agricultural models we are considering?

Neo-liberal economics is tied to the historical straightjacket of
classical liberal economic theory (or at least one interpretation of it)
which in part is dependant on a Ricardian notion of comparative advantage.
In the hustle and bustle of political debate regarding integration
(federalism, democracy etc) the underlying concept of an economic structure
within which each region seeks a trade advantage is often lost. However, it
is the validity of this argument upon which the whole structure is
essentially based. As in the words of the former leader of the GATT
Sutherland 'We are all winers'. This might be true if we all had a role to
play. So what is the role for Mexican agriculture?

Capitalism suffers from a central economic weakness which is that once
scarcity has been solved as a problem it has no project. This whole problem
is academically subsumed into the question of price elasticity. Basically if
you produce a commodity where need/want has been fundamentally satisfied you
are a loser and if you produce a commodity where need either has not been
satisfied or can be generated by advertising you are a potental winner. To
give an example you won't buy more coffee tomorrow even if the price were to
halve (or at least not significantly so) whereas you might run two cars if
the cost of running one halved (and you live in a social unit comprising of
two potential car drivers).

Agriculture (apart from for example asparagus ferns for Interflora
packaging) is largely a price inelastic market. The capitalist project of
supplying demand has been solved and so within a capitalist system those
involved in this area are redundant. Those who will make a success of this
sector will be capital intensive.

This is of necessity a simplistic version of an argument which is just as
applicable in its more sophisticated version. Its consequences are far
reaching but in terms of Mexican agriculture the results are pretty stark.
Even in this field where the capitalist economic problem has largely been
solved we are considering, within the confines of the NAFTA a third world
country (for indeed that is what Mexico is) competing with the most capital
intensive agricultural system in the world. We are comparing some of the
richest lands in the world with farmers dealing with hillsides that never
had rich and deep topsoils. This isn't competition it is a rout. Some figures:

The impact of NAFTA is illustrated by the productivity figures on corn,
the single most important crop of the Mexican peasant. While Mexico averages
1.7 tons of corn per ha., the United States produces seven tons. One might
think that Mexico could remain competitive because its labor costs are only
a fraction of what they are in the United States. But this is not the case.
To produce one ton of corn in Mexico 17.8 labor days are required, while in
the United States only 1.2 hours are needed to produce that same ton of corn!

Figures on bean production, the other historic Mexican staple, also
reveal a dismal future for Mexican peasants. Mexico produces about half a
ton per hectare, while the U.S. weighs in with 1.6 tons. In Mexico 50.6
labor days are needed to produce each ton of beans while in the United
States, just over half a day of work is required.

Such figures were produced prior to the economic collapse last December.
In theory the revaluation of the peso within the global system should make
Mexican exports more competitive but the theory goes up the swanny as I have
said given the inelasticity of the products involved. Some advantage will be
gained by those farmers already geared towards an exchange-value economy
rather than a needs value economy but it will be slight and the whole of
Mexican society will have to pay the social cost (unemployment austerity
progs etc) which even before the crash painted a bleak picture.

The neo-liberal route which has tied its colours to the NAFTA mast
doesn't look too promising even from the World Bank's viewpoint, who
concluded in a plan that it funded but didn't endorse that the changes to
Article 27 of the Mexican constitution relating to land reform 'are unlikely
to achieve the lofty goals of enhancing productivity and modernizing
agriculture that are desired by the Mexican government." Instead foreign
capital (what there is of it) will invest minimally in the ejido sector,
given its general marginality and poor quality lands. As a result some
ejidos will shift to less capital intensive private livestock. Only a few of
the "best endowed agricultural areas" will consolidate under large scale
entrepreneurs who will concentrate on providing inputs for food processing
operations, that is the external market.

Given the propensity for the large landowners to direct their efforts to
the international arena staple food under the neo liberal framework will not
be produced in sufficient quantities for any degree of autarkic dvelopment.
Currently the ejidos produce two-thirds of Mexico's beans and corn and 70
percent of the rice.

THE SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES

An alternative to this exchange-value approach has to begin by
recognizing that the Mexican state's policy of intervention in the campesino
economy has failed. It is not because of any inherent "backwardness" of the
ejido or because of a lack of initiative on the part of the Mexican
peasantry. It is the development strategies of a "modernizing" Mexican state
that have created and perpetuated poverty.

As David Barkin has argued "in spite of innumerable government programs
created precisely to aid agricultural modernization, the history of
institutional intervention in Mexico demonstrates a definite socio-economic
bias against the majority of poor farmers." As we have seen the priorities
of the Mexican regime were, as is the case with the statist approach, not
geared towards the resolution of economic problems by addressing the
agricultural qustion but rather the putting of political control before
economic development and favoring the urban industrial economy at the
expense of the agricultural sector.

This further demonstrates that the only solution for Mexico's food
crisis is a real agrarian reform, not one where peasants are once again
relocated to the country's worst remaining soils, while the best lands are
held in larger estates.

It follows, surely, therefore that ultimately, the key to a new
agriculture is the empowerment of the peasantry. The ejidos and agrarian
communities have to have the resources they need and empowerment to find
their own solutions. Clearly the question of social and political
organisation is crucial here.

POLITICAL ORGANISATION

In the past the movements against clientelism tended to be spearheaded by
national leftist parties, and this centralized control meant that the
organizing agendas of local campesino organizations were determined by the
political strategies of Mexico City-based parties. There has also been a
history of more independent political party organizing by campesino
organizations that have attempted to pursue their demands through political
channels. In Morelos, Sonora, Guerrero, and Oaxaca,campesinos joined with
workers and other popular sectors to create home-grown political parties to
challenge PRI hegemony. In all instances, the government responded to such
political challenges with repression, largely discouraging further attempts
by campesinos to organize in this way. Somewhat as a result of this more
recent campesino organisations have tended to eschew all political activity
all together. By the late 1980s this commitment to political independence
and autonomy became an increasingly evident strategy. Fearful of being
subsumed by corporatism, the more radical wing of the campesino movement
declined to support the opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1988.

ISSUES OF INTERNAL DEMOCRATISATION

The campesino movement has in recent years become increasingly concerned
with issues of internal democratization. More grassroots involvement and
control of the new campesino organizations increased with the fading power
of the ejidal comisariados and the emergence of new credit, food
distribution, and other service organizations in the mid-1970s. The
declining influence of the government-sponsored National Campesino
Federation and the creation of new local and regional organizations linked
to national networks also created room for a more democratic campesino
movement. Also important was the participation of the "generation of 1968"
as technical advisors and academic consultants to the new organizations.

The increasingly democratic character of the campesino movement was
also a product of the integration of traditional community organizations
into producer networks. This was especially evident in the National Network
of Coffee Growers Organizations (CNOC), which was firmly anchored in local
and regional organizations that combined the structures of direct and
representative democracy. The vibrant democracy of village assemblies and
the regular regional meetings of village delegates contrasts sharply with
the top-down character of Mexican political institutions and demonstrates
the viability and efficiency of bottom-up social structures.

Since the 1970s campesino organizations have made great strides in
creating more democratic structures. But many shortcomings remain. The
clientelistic, elitist, and paternalistic behavior for which Mexican
political parties and government agencies are criticized is also found
within campesino organizations. Overdependence on one leader or honcho
persists in many organizations, the most prominent case being that of the
EZLN and its "spokesperson" Subcomandante Marcos.

Certainly the EZLN can be seen to be tainted in this way but it was
essentially the EZLN which has been instrumental in organising in Chiapas a
grassroots movement for democratization that was at least as important as
the electoral aspects of democratization. In Chiapas, a State Assembly of
the Chiapanecan People formed as a loose coalition of citizen groups,
campesino organizations, democratic union currents, and NGOs. Responding to
the call of the EZLN, a National Democratic Convention was held immediately
before the August 1994 elections that brought together human rights groups,
leftist academics and scholars, and popular organizations, united in their
conviction of the lack of real democracy in Mexico.

Formal institutions such as the National Democratic Convention and the
State Assembly of the Chiapanecan people were established largely as a
result of the EZLN's call for organized civil society to take the lead in
pushing for an up-from-the-bottom process of democratization. This
grassroots movement for liberty took hold at the village level in Chiapas as
communities began to challenge the pervasive hold of the caciques in the
Altos de Chiapas and to confront municipal authorities with charges of
corruption. The rising recognition in Mexico that the deep racial and caste
divisions need to be addressed and a reinvigorated sense of indigenous
idenity have also been important advances in the creation of a more
democratic society in Mexico.